Laura Ingraham Says Men Don’t Like Liberals and Calls Trump an Alpha Male But the Take Is Raising Eyebrows

Fox News host Laura Ingraham didn’t mince words the other day when she jumped into the conversation about why young male voters helped carry Donald Trump to victory in 2024. She boiled the Democratic Party’s struggles with that group down to one simple claim: men just don’t like liberals.

She was reacting to research and a Politico article that found some male voters see Democrats as overly scripted and cautious, while Republicans come across as more confident and willing to speak their minds without worrying about offending anyone. Ingraham’s response was basically “newsflash.” Normal men, she said, want strength, patriotism, and plain common sense — not whatever the other side is offering right now.

To hammer the point home, she played a clip of Kamala Harris telling that coconut tree story from the campaign and reacted with a mix of amusement and dismissal, saying she had almost forgotten about it. Then she landed her closer: “Alpha male Trump has driven Democrats absolutely bonkers.”

It’s the kind of framing that pops up now and then in conservative media — tying Trump to this idea of alpha masculinity and suggesting that’s what real men respond to. Similar comments have come from people like Stephen Miller in the past, who’ve argued that young guys looking to project strength and attract attention should wear their Trump support openly.

The piece doesn’t just repeat the clip though. It steps back and questions whether this whole “alpha male” label is actually helpful or accurate. The term itself has a shaky backstory. It traces back to old studies on wolves that were done in captivity and later walked back by the researchers themselves because they didn’t reflect how wolves behave in the wild. In everyday conversation these days, it mostly just signals a guy who’s dominant, in control, and socially on top.

Relationship experts and therapists quoted in the article push back on the idea that this is some natural or ideal way for men to show up. They argue it can narrow things down too much — pushing the message that masculinity is mostly about power over others instead of qualities like emotional maturity, mutual respect, and actually being able to connect with people. One therapist pointed out that when guys feel pressure to stay emotionally disconnected and dominant all the time, it often backfires in real relationships, leaving both sides unhappy.

There’s also a bigger thread about what happens when a lot of young men have real drive and energy but fewer traditional outlets for it. The article references older ideas from books like Robert Bly’s Iron John — the notion of a “wild man” energy that used to get shaped through mentorship and real brotherhood, but now sometimes gets twisted into something more aggressive and performative online. Add in the data showing men’s friendships have shrunk dramatically over the decades, and it starts to look like a deeper story than just “liberals bad, alphas good.”

Back in 1990, a majority of men said they had at least six close friends. By 2021 that number had been cut roughly in half. The share of guys reporting zero close friends jumped from around 3 percent to 15 percent. That tracks with wider conversations about loneliness and how guys are often taught early on that needing other people makes them soft.

At the end of the day, the piece suggests that reducing politics, attraction, and identity to these alpha-versus-everyone-else categories misses a lot. Plenty of people — men included — are looking for something more straightforward and genuine. Someone who can be direct without turning it into a performance. Someone who treats people decently even when it’s not for show. Faking a persona might open a door or two, but it tends to fall apart once the real version shows up.